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Detailed description of the performance “GODOT”

A dance performance based on the play of Samuel Beckett “Waiting for Godot”

The company by choosing one of the masterpieces of the world wide dramaturgy faces a double challenge. The aim is to somehow maintain the structure and the personages but also to give the topical content of the play. A play that is always based on speech, gives now the reason to the bodies to “talk” and to “discuss” by changing words with movements.

On stage, four dancers, each one on a specific role of the play, they borrow the style of the silent movies, which have also affected the Irish writer. The background of the stage (video) is a modern urban landscape, as undetermined wishes and Samuel Beckett himself.

The world of waiting for Godot is a world in which nothing happens, where time passes with one excruciatingly interminable wait. The heroes are waiting for “something” playing with words to pass the time. A play does not have to narrate a story to be a play, proposes Samuel Beckett. A dance performance is not required to narrate a story in order to talk with the audience. With basic tool of the work the four heroes, coining certain characters as rarely happens in modern dance, we represent perhaps the most famous play with given plot but no specific narrative.

Our times more beckett-like than ever, confronts us with nihilism and inaction. Waiting for an outside salvation seems to be the only hope, the only meaning of existence.

“And now what will become of us without the barbarians?

Those people were some kind of solution.”

says the Greek poet Konstantinos P. Kavafis

Basically, “Waiting for Godot” seems to talk about how to write a play and how to fill a bit of time with dialog….or movement.

The challenge to simulate this play through a dance performance is great. So far in our choreographies the topics were purely conceptual and the narrative was extremely difficult. The narrative in dance is always a difficult problem. The purely physical approach to every topic complicated things even more, because it makes it more difficult for the audience to understand what the performance wants to say. The use of rhythm has been so far our tool to give birth to the narration, the story, the dramaturgy.

And voila, the play with time viscous, almost invisible, stationary. A play with no time, no place, no movement…

But by looking a little better, there is the place, the stable place: the characters. In fact their pre-existance. Until now we were obliged to reinvent ourselves again and again on stage. Now the characters are there and will be till the fall of the curtain.

The choreography is an attempt to approach each character’s dance separately and will be released only in Lucky’s monologue. Instructions as Estragon more down to earth and Vladimir more jumping around and Pozzo as a gentleman, an insecure knight, are clearly below the choreographic and movement research.

But clearly a greater role plays the use of space by these four characters. With the subconscious baptized by Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, we choose to move into echoes of a waltz dance and to make a manipulation of space as if it was a chessboard and us its pones.